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  • Realism's Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel
  • Elsie B. Michie (bio)
Realism's Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel, by Geoffrey Baker; pp. ix + 246. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2009, $49.95, $9.95 CD-ROM.

Geoffrey Baker's book Realism's Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the Nineteenth-Century Novel tells a story that is the obverse of Ian Baucom's in Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (1999). While Baucom shows how English identity is reconstructed in colonial locales, Baker is interested in tracing the presence "of the foreign within the domestic" in the nineteenth-century novel (vii). Focusing on three novelists (Honoré de Balzac, Anthony Trollope, and Theodor Fontane) whose works span the period from 1831 to 1894, Baker charts the impact of foreign objects and persons—what he calls "talisman[s]" (20), taking this term from Balzac's La Peau de chagrin (1831)—on stories that present themselves as primarily realistic, in the sense of being empiricist, fact-based, and scientific. Baker intends to trouble the borderlines of traditional definitions of realism, making readers aware of the presence of what he variously terms magic, romance, and enchantment in the midst of what seem to be thoroughly disenchanted, fully mapped modern worlds.

His approach is three pronged; he is interested in the way "certain nineteenth-century novels rely on an imported colonial figure" (8), the way "this peripheral figure occasions a remapping or unmapping of . . . ordered urban space" and the centrality of the city to this analysis (9). This means that in the case of each novelist he isolates a figure of foreignness. In the case of Balzac, it is the ass's skin in La Peau de chagrin, the discussion of the Mandarin and Vautrin in Le Père Goriot (1835), and the title character of La Fille aux yeux d'or (1834). In the case of Trollope, it is the Irishman Phineas Finn in Phineas Finn (1869) and Phineas Redux (1873), and Augustus Melmotte in The Way We Live Now (1874-75). In the case of Fontane, it is the partially Scottish engineer Robert von Gordon-Leslie in Cécile (1887) and the Chinese ghost in Effie Briest (1895). The focus on Balzac, Trollope, and Fontane also means that Baker can discuss the fictional rendition of three different urban environments at three different historical moments: Paris in the 1830s, London in [End Page 160] the 1860s, and Berlin in the 1880s, all cities that have slightly different relations to colonialism and cosmopolitanism.

Of the book's three emphases, the middle one, involving a rethinking of space, generates the most interesting and original readings. In his introduction Baker cites both Edward Said and Franco Moretti, arguing that "between the novel that acts on space" (Moretti's position) and "the space that acts on the novel" (Said's), "there exists a more complex arrangement endemic to literary realism—a type of novel in which, in its efforts realistically to record or reflect a certain space . . . finds its mere recording . . . challenged by its need to accede to the demands of narrative" (6, emphasis original). Baker is particularly interested in junctures where the presence of the foreign drives the nineteenth-century novel to reconfigure realist space, and his readings of such moments are fascinating. He shows how the reference to Ann Radcliffe in the description of a carriage ride in La Fille aux yeux d'or transforms both the space and time of the reader's experience of Paris, re-enchanting the milieu of the nineteenth-century city. In the case of Trollope, he explores echoes between the names of the county Phineas Finn represents in Ireland and those of the Scottish estate possessed by Robert Kennedy to show how these Celtic geographical milieus are conflated, and, through allusions to Walter Scott's Waverley (1814), rendered magical. In his analysis of Fontane, he explores the way the "distanciation of the town from the metropolis . . . grants the former a certain status as a locus of openness to magic and mystery" (187).

In his readings of spaces (houses, towns, estates) and the way characters move through...

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